


All The Reasons (I Can Never Go Home Again)

by Verasteine



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-11
Updated: 2011-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:49:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verasteine/pseuds/Verasteine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary doesn't mean to miss the phone call that was supposed to tell her of her father's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Reasons (I Can Never Go Home Again)

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to all the people who held my hand and commented on this fic in its various stages: [](http://kilawater.livejournal.com/profile)[**kilawater**](http://kilawater.livejournal.com/) , [](http://eumelia.livejournal.com/profile)[**eumelia**](http://eumelia.livejournal.com/) ,[](http://sirona-gs.livejournal.com/profile)[ **sirona_gs**](http://sirona-gs.livejournal.com/) , and [](http://alba17.livejournal.com/profile)[**alba17**](http://alba17.livejournal.com/). All of you helped make this better and brighter.

She's been looking for Eileen for a week when she finally finds her, in a rundown motel room with cockroaches crawling all over the bathroom sink. Mary can't see it, can't see why Eileen would do this to herself, would live like this -- only then she looks into Eileen's eyes, sees the blown pupils.

"Oh, man, not again."

She hauls her off the bed, ignores her screams, finally enforces her cooperation by shoving her under a cold shower. The passenger seat of her car is drenched when she drops Eileen off at the rehab centre, but it's worth it, worth it because she has to take care of the only friend she's really got, the only person who's ever understood.

The car isn't worth much, anyway.

\--

She's back at work first thing in the morning, ready to make a good impression after her impromptu vacation, needing to hang on to her job.

Bill looks at her when she clocks in, says her name, calls her into the office. She suppresses the eye roll automatically, starts in as soon as he closes the door. "Look, I know, okay, I know, but my friend, she was in trouble. I'll make up the hours, you know I always do, Bill, you know me, okay?"

"Mary," he says, and that's when she realises he's not pissed.

"What?" She puts a hand on her hip. "What is it? Someone die or something?"

"Mary," Bill says, looking at her with more compassion than he has in the three years she's worked at the record store. "Mary, your brother called."

\--

It's a slip of paper, torn from the notepad that always lies by the phone, Steve's name on it, a phone number, and the words, _Mary's father died_. It's Kinley's handwriting, and she wonders how he could be so cold writing it down, then remembers that she scribbles along automatically to what's said on the other end, too.

Man, he's gonna hate her for having to take that message for her.

At the bottom of the note, there's a second scribble. _Called 5 times_ , it reads, _she's not home_.

No, she wasn't.

"We nearly called the cops on you," Bill had said, and wouldn't that just have been fun. They're freaking useless, they were useless when she went to them about Eileen, too, had to sort that problem out by herself. Cops.

She has a flash of memory, her father in uniform, from when she was very young and he still worked the beat. There's something like a whisper of guilt floating through her chest, and she tries to feel it, tries to feel more of it, but it snakes away.

\--

She calls, in the end, has to pick up the phone and dial. It rings four times; she's just beginning to wonder if she's going to get the ghostly sensation of hearing her father's voice on the answering machine when the call connects.

"Hello?"

It's somehow still unexpected, and she has to clear her throat before she can manage words. "Steve."

"Mary?"

"Yeah." She sighs. "Yeah." It feels like they're strangers to each other; she has trouble remembering the last time she spoke to him. Was it her birthday, when he last called? She can't recall, feels tears pricking in her eyes at the inability to remember such simple details. She scrubs at them, bites her lip until the pain is stronger than the urge to cry.

"Where are you? I've been calling you, Mary."

Steve chooses anger to hide his concern; he's like their dad so much that it could kill her if she'd let it. "I was-- there was this thing, I had to. But I got your message, okay, work gave it to me."

It doesn't mollify him. "I was about to get LAPD to send someone to your house."

"Great, more freaking cops." She hears his sharp intake of breath, knows he's gearing up for something. Half of their life has been stilted communication by email and too short phone calls; she feels like she knows the sound of his breathing better than the features of his face. "I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to-- I'm fine, don't worry about me."

He breathes out slowly. "Okay."

She's silent for a moment, and so is he. Finally she says, "Why are you-- Are you packing up the house?"

"What? No, no, I'm, uh... I'm moving here."

She takes the phone away from her ear and stares at it for a moment. "You're going to Pearl Harbor?"

"No, I transferred." His voice is filled with a certainty that is belied by the undercurrent of resignation she can hear. "The governor asked me to head up a taskforce for the state."

Her brother the ninja, who gets job offers from the governor of Hawaii. Her life pales in comparison to the classy circles Steve moves in. "What kind of taskforce?"

"Big stuff, organised crime, drugs, gun running, that sort of thing."

 _That sort of thing_. What is normal to him is not normal to her, and she doesn't know what to say. "Oh, okay."

"How've you been, Mary?"

She hears a creak of furniture in the background, imagines him sitting down, staring out over the beach. The sun should be setting in Hawaii now; she remembers the colours, the brightness that you don't get with the LA smog. She tries to fill in the picture but her memories fail, and she walks into the kitchen, flips on the light to look at the photo on the fridge, the one he sent her three years ago.

She barely recognised him then, tall and lean, strong shoulders filling out a uniform that suits him better than she ever imagined it could.

"Mary?"

"Yeah," she replies too quickly, swallows away the lump in her throat as she traces a finger over the face in the photograph. "I've been good, you know how it is, bills get paid, work's been okay."

"Yeah? That's good."

She clings, for a moment, to the sound of genuine concern in his voice. "I've got to go," she says, and before she can hear his reply, she hangs up.

\--

The next communication from him is a rambling email about money that she files away for later reference, and then letters from a swanky law firm start arriving and she almost thinks she's getting sued by someone, maybe that guy who hit her car last month, and she dreads to open them.

Instead they talk about money, about settling her inheritance, about her brother buying her out of her share of the house, and would she sign on the dotted line.

She spends an evening raging at her apartment walls, raging at Steve's picture on the fridge, furious with everything till the neighbours pound on the walls, threatening to call the cops.

"Call the fucking cops!" Mary yells back. "See how I care," and slides down the wall to sit on the floor, crying.

\--

She's on her break, at the mall, nowhere to go to smoke a fucking cigarette because everyone is so fucking politically correct now, and she has to walk all the way to the exit just to get her nicotine hit.

She's trying to quit, but she can't keep her head above water long enough. Too much that keeps pulling her back, like the day Eileen went missing, when she'd been on her third day without a cigarette. She's cut back, though, no more whole packets a day; she's counting the wins in cutting down to three a day, tries to be proud of herself for the simple things.

It's a hard slog.

She's walking back inside, idly looking at the windows she goes past, not really registering the promotional offers that are the same every three months, cyclical and monotonous.

There's a picture of Honolulu in the travel agent's window. The skyscrapers have bred like bunnies, but she knows that coastline, knows those hills, those roads, and she stops in her tracks, breathing that picture in like it's the wind coming in from the bay, the clean air she doesn't remember the smell of any more, the lights and the sounds that are so different from what she falls asleep to at night.

She goes in, books the ticket.

Bill yells at her for overstaying on her break, she yells back, and quits.

\--

"McGarrett."

She laughs at his tone. "Oh, man, Steve, you've got to get better at answering the phone."

Someone is talking in the background, and Steve says, "Hang on." She hears the sound of footsteps, a soft squeak, and then silence. "Okay."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"I, uh..." It seems stupid now, even as she's smoothing her fingers over the ticket, LAX to Honolulu International, one way. "I'm coming home."

"What?" Steve says.

"I've bought a ticket. I'm coming to visit."

"Mare..."

"Aren't you at least a little bit happy?"

His voice is lower, a little raw, when he answers. "I'm happy, Mary. I'm happy. I promise."

"You better be," she shoots back, and bites her lip. His picture is looking at her from the fridge, and she smiles at him, smiles at him in her mind.

 _I'm going to see my brother._

\--  
 _finis._


End file.
